Tablet shoppers are three times more likely to buy than smartphone shoppers

Consumers use tablets similar to the way they use a PC—to compare products and buy, a new study says. They use smartphones for quick actions like checking a price or finding a store.

Indeed, the tablet conversion rate is 2.2% while smartphones come in at 0.7%, according to the new research from Adobe Systems Inc. titled “The State of Mobile Benchmark Q2 2013.” Conversion rates on computers, meanwhile are 3.3%, the report notes.

Shoppers also visit 70% more pages on a site when using a tablet compared to a smartphone, visiting an average of 1.7 pages per site visit on tablets. The research looked at mobile browsing statistics of more than 150 billion visits to more than 1,500 sites in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Japan and China between January 2012 and February 2013. The specific mobile shopping statistics are based on an analysis of more than 500 retail web sites in December 2012 across those same countries.

When consumers browse the web via a smartphone, Apple Inc.’s iOS and Google Inc.’s Android mobile operating systems are the most popular, the report also notes. While that may not be surprising in the U.S., it was true across all six countries Adobe examined. Android and iOS account for nearly 90% of smartphone Internet browsing in the six countries. In the U.S., the U.K. and France, iOS is the leading smartphone operating system. In Japan and China and Germany, Android leads. When it comes to web use stemming from tablets, iOS and the iPad lead, with more than 77% of Internet use across the six countries examined.

Across all countries, smartphone web users visit telecom, media and entertainment sites the most. While retail web sites are the most popular sites for tablet users to visit, followed by auto and hospitality sites.